“I seen guys get killed,” Mr. Pugh said. “In Iraq I seen our guys get killed and a lot of Raqs running off to meet Allah.”
“That was war,” I said. “This ain’t war.”
“Yeah, whatever. He didn’t ask you nothing about me?”
“No.”
We drove the rest of the way to Evergreen in silence. I knew what Mr. Pugh was thinking. He could have lost his job if Mr. Cintron knew he had split from the room when he saw what was going down. I wasn’t going to rat Mr. Pugh out because I knew he could do a lot more to me than I could to him.
We got to Evergreen, and he parked the van and came around to my side.
“You’re doing okay,” he grumbled at me. “Don’t mess it up.”
I wasn’t really doing okay. Mr. Cintron had been in my corner and now he wasn’t. He’d made that clear, but he’d also said he wanted me to make it happen for all the juvies who were going to follow me. I liked that.
Father Santora was in the lobby when we got there, and he came up with this big smile and reached out to shake my hand. I couldn’t shake his because Mr. Pugh hadn’t uncuffed me.
Once I was uncuffed, Mr. Pugh said he would be by to pick me up at four, and then Father Santora sent for Simi. She came down and he told her to have me working on the rest floor.
Simi was short and brown skinned. It looked like all the help at Evergreen were colored and the residents were all white. She had a little gold tooth on one side of her mouth. It looked a little strange, but she had a nice smile.
“I have a cousin who looks just like you,” Simi said as we walked up the steel stairs. “Only he’s got good hair.”
“That’s nice,” I said, which sounded stupid even before it got all the way out.
The rooms on the rest floor looked a little like our quarters at Progress. They weren’t small but they weren’t huge, either. Each room had a bed, a sink, a chest with drawers, and a smaller room, about the size of a closet, with a toilet. They also had at least one window, which was cool. The beds were the kind I had seen in hospitals. If you pressed a button, the head or foot would come up.
Some of the rooms had oxygen tanks in them. We had an oxygen tank at Progress in the nurse’s office.
Simi, who looked okay, kind of Spanish and kind of black, gave me a big plastic bag and told me to go to each room and collect any garbage they might have.
“Six rooms. We had patients in seven rooms but Mr. Cloder died,” Simi said. “You get used to that. All of these people here are very old. After a while they die and you say amen and you move on. After you collect all the garbage, then you go and you stay with Mr. Hoof. He’s not feeling good and he might need some help. Anything he wants you to do, you do it.”
“Which one is Mr. Hoof?”
“Can you read?” Simi asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so when you go into the rooms, you look at the nametags on the inside of the door. When you see one that says Mr. Hoof, then you know who he is. All right?”
“Yeah.”
“And knock before you go in, even if the door is open,” Simi said.
My conversation with Mr. Cintron kicked back in and I wanted to impress Simi with all the work I was going to do. I wanted to impress Mr. Hoof, too, but I didn’t know who he was yet.
I went to each room, knocked, and when whoever was in the room asked me what I wanted, I said I was supposed to collect the garbage.
“Why isn’t Simi doing it?” a man asked me. The name on his door read GONDER.
“I don’t know, sir,” I answered. “She just told me to do it and she’s in charge of me, so…”
“Don’t take my newspapers,” the man said. “Sometimes I read them over to see if I’ve missed anything.”
“I do that sometimes too,” I said.
“Where do you live?” Mr. Gonder turned his head as if his neck was stiff.
“Just past the Bronx,” I said.
“Where past the Bronx?” he asked.
“Near the warehouses,” I said, not wanting to tell him I was at Progress.
“You should move to Harlem,” Mr. Gonder said. “They’re fixing it up nice. My uncle lived there years ago when it was a really good neighborhood.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t think you live up there,” Mr. Gonder said. “You look like you’re from Brooklyn. You from Brooklyn?”
“No, sir.”
“I can tell where people come from by the way they talk, too,” Mr. Gonder said. “They got a certain way of talking in Brooklyn. I don’t like it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Hoof’s room was the last one I went into. I saw his name on the door but it wasn’t Hoof, as I thought—it was Hooft.
“Hello, sir, I came to collect any garbage you have,” I said.
“Where’s the colored girl that was doing it?”
“She’s in charge of me,” I said. “And she told me to collect the garbage.”
He was sitting on a chair near the window. He had a book in his lap and I thought it might be a Bible. I found a newspaper on the floor and asked if I should throw it away.
Mr. Hooft motioned with his hand and I put the paper in the plastic bag. He looked really old and thin. His face was white but he had a lot of dark marks on his cheeks that looked like birthmarks. I thought maybe he had a disease.
I finished picking up the stuff in Mr. Hooft’s room and took it out to where Simi was sitting at a desk in the hallway. She asked me if I had any trouble and I told her no. She took me to a closet at the end of the hall, opened it, and told me to tie the top of the bag up tight and then put it in the closet.
“The cleaning staff picks it up at night and puts it out for the waste disposal people,” she said. “So what do you think of Mr. Hooft?”
“He’s okay, I guess.”
“He’s nice once you get to know him,” she said. “Come on, I’ll give the two of you a formal introduction.”
I thought that was cool. I also noticed that Simi knocked on the door even though Mr. Hooft saw us coming.
“Hello, Pieter,” she said. “I want you to meet Reese. He’s here from the Progress Facility and he’s going to be working ten days a month for us. We think he’s going to do a marvelous job.”
“What’s the Progress Facility?”
“It’s a place for young men who have made a mistake,” Simi said. “But I think Reese has learned his lesson and now he’s on the right road. Aren’t you, Reese?”
“Yes.” My heart sank when I saw Mr. Hooft’s face. He was looking over at me as if he was scared of me.
He beckoned Simi over and pulled her next to him. I heard him say that he didn’t want me in his room.
Simi straightened up. “Mr. Hooft, you’ll have to work with whatever staff we have. Reese is a very intelligent boy and he will be working with us. Now you two get acquainted, because he’s going to be assisting you with keeping your room clean, with your personal hygiene, and anything else you need. He’s a very good young man.”
Simi patted me on the arm and walked out of the door.
Mr. Hooft looked at me and then looked toward the door as if he might have thought about getting up and running. I saw a cane in the corner of the room, so I knew he wouldn’t be running too fast.
For a while we were silent, me standing in the middle of the floor and him sitting by the window looking at me. I tried to think of something good to say.
“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”
He got up slowly and I thought he was going to leave the room, but then he went into the little bathroom. I didn’t know if he was going to stay in there, maybe lock himself up or what. There was a stool near the chest, and I went over and sat on it.
I hadn’t been around a lot of old people before and I didn’t know how to act. There had been a program on television about teenagers robbing old people. Maybe he had seen that and was getting spooked. Simi had told me to stay with him, so I just sat on the stool.
After a while the door opened and he came out and looked around the room like he was wondering if I was still there. I stood up and he looked me up and down.
Then he went back to his place on the chair.
“You murdered somebody?” he asked me.
“No, sir,” I said. “I didn’t murder anybody.”
“White or black person?” he asked. He had an accent.
“Sir, I didn’t murder anybody,” I repeated.
“You’re in jail now?”
“Yes.” I didn’t like saying I was in jail. I remembered when I first got to Progress I began thinking about what I would say to people when I got out, what I would call the place.
“You raped a woman?”
“No, man. I didn’t rape a woman and I didn’t kill anybody.”
“So what did you do?”
“I would rather not say.”
“Simi!” Mr. Hooft called out. “Simi!”
“Sir, please give me a chance,” I asked him.
“What did you do so terrible you can’t even say the words?” he asked. “Simi! Simi!”
Simi came to the door and looked at me and then at Mr. Hooft.
“What happened?” she asked.
“This man, is he a murderer?”
“No, he is not a murderer, Mr. Hooft.” Simi put her arm around my waist. “He’s a very nice young boy.”
“If he was a very nice young boy, he wouldn’t be in jail,” Mr. Hooft said.
“Sometimes, Mr. Hooft, people make mistakes,” Simi said. “And Reese will be working with you.”
She left again and I saw that Mr. Hooft had got his cane and was leaning on it as he sat. He was breathing kind of heavy. Then he turned his head toward me.
“So what did you do?”
“I needed money real bad,” I said. “I knew this one guy, Freddy Booker, who hung out on my block, was dealing prescription medicines. He was getting homeless dudes to go to certain doctors and get prescriptions for painkillers and Viagra and things like that. They would give him the prescriptions and he would give them, like, two dollars apiece or something like that. Then he would get the prescriptions filled and sell the pills on the street. He would buy any kind of prescription that was either sex medicine or painkillers.
“I knew where this doctor had a storefront office. It was in a rough neighborhood and usually closed at night. I know it was wrong, sir, but I broke in and stole a whole bunch of blank prescription forms. The ones with the numbers on them. I sold them to the guy who was dealing prescription drugs.
“What happened then was this same guy was busted for dealing with a doctor downtown on 127th Street.”
“In Brooklyn?”
“No, in Harlem.”
“Then what happened?”
“When he got picked up, he snitched out everybody he knew, including me. They charged me with about eighteen counts of dealing drugs and unlawful distribution and stuff like that, everything the guy was charged with. I copped a plea to doing just what I did, and that’s how I got to Progress, sir.
“But yo, like, I’m trying to turn my life around and I’m not going to do anything like that again. That’s for sure.”
“I don’t like colored people,” Mr. Hooft said. “Nothing personal, I just don’t like them. And you’re a colored criminal and I don’t like criminals, either.”
“Right.” I had been standing up but I sat back down again. I knew if Mr. Hooft said anything negative about me, said I sassed him or anything, it was going to go against me, so I just shut up. Even if it wasn’t true, it didn’t matter. I was a criminal, like he said, and what really went down didn’t matter all that much.
“Did you know the doctor?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“But you stole from him anyway, and this other person, the one you were working for—what was his name?”
“Mr. Hoof, I wasn’t working for him—”
“Hooft! With a t. Colored people can’t say that? P-i-e-t-e-r Hooft!” Mr. Hooft said. “Simi can’t say it and you can’t say it. There are certain things in your makeup which make you who you are. You coloreds steal and use drugs and you kill people and you can’t even pronounce a name. Your brains are bad. That’s why you were slaves.”
What I would have liked to do was to hop to this sucker and beat his head in, but it would’ve been the same as beating my own head in, because I would be the one doing the most suffering. I didn’t feel I was letting what he said slide, but I held back from saying what I really felt.
When Mr. Pugh came to pick me up, I was ready to go back. He asked me if I had had a nice vacation.
“I was working,” I said.
“What were you doing?”
“Picking up garbage,” I said.
“Good job for you,” Mr. Pugh said.
CHAPTER 8
At Progress you could get visitors any day between 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, and on Saturdays and Sundays between 10 and 6 in the afternoon. I hadn’t had any visitors, so when Mr. Wilson called me out of the dayroom Sunday afternoon I thought it was a mistake.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Your mother and sister,” he said with a grin. “I might have to steal your little sister, she’s so cute.”
I stopped dead in the hallway and looked at Wilson to see if he was kidding. My moms hadn’t visited me in months. “You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s for you. Remember, they can’t give you anything to bring into the facility,” Wilson said. “They’re supposed to leave all gifts at the office.”
“Yeah, okay.”
The visitors’ room was decent. There were red and yellow tables you could sit at and real curtains on the windows. There were cameras in each corner of the room, but I didn’t mind them. A television was tuned to the weather channel.
I looked around and saw a woman who looked like my mom standing in front of one of the vending machines. She was alone. For some reason I thought for a moment she might not recognize me.
“Hey.”
My mother turned and looked at me and smiled. She was looking neat, maybe a little thinner than the last time I saw her.
“Well, how you doing?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” I said.
She kissed me on the cheek. “You’re taller!” she said. “They must be feeding you good.”
“The food’s okay,” I said.
We sat at one of the tables. “They said that Icy was with you.”
“She’s in the bathroom,” Mom said. “So what’s going on?”
“Ain’t nothing going on,” I said. “I’m in here doing the time.”
“I tried to get your father to come up,” she said. “He said he was tied up and maybe he would get up the next time.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s so far back in his child-support payments I can’t even keep track of them,” she said. “I got a date to take him down to Family Court and he didn’t show. They don’t do anything, so I don’t know why I keep getting dates.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Icy come out of the bathroom. She came over with her hands on her hips doing her movie-star walk.
“Reesy, darling!”
“Yo, Icy!” I got up and she threw her arms around me and hugged me harder than I thought she could. “Let me look at you, girl.”
Icy stepped back and put her hands on her hips and turned around.
“Yo, you sure you’re nine or you’re nineteen?” I asked.
“What were you doing?” Icy asked, slipping into a chair at the table. “I bet you were playing video games.”
“I don’t think they have any video games in here,” I answered. “How long it take you to get up here?”
“We got the bus at twelve thirty,” Mom said. “But I bet it stopped in every little place that had a convenience store or a gas station. My back is killing me.”
“You should try riding the van all the way up here,” I said. “When I came up
, the scenery was nice, though.”
“They got a school,” Mom said. “I saw it in the brochure. You learning much?”
“Learning I don’t want to be up here,” I said.
“We’re learning how to divide fractions in school,” Icy said.
“You going to summer school?” I asked.
“If I go to summer school, then I can get into Harlem Children’s Zone.” Icy squinched her eyes up and wiggled the way she does when she’s pleased with herself.
“They’re not taking you just because you got a half a dimple,” I said. “You got to have something in here.” I tapped her on the head.
“I got smarts going on,” she said. “And now that I heard the good news, you know I’m going to study hard.”
“What’s the good news?”
“Hillary Clinton is not going to be the president, so that leaves the door open for me to become the first woman president,” Icy said.
“They giving out GEDs?” Mom asked.
“You can take the course or you can apply for the tests,” I said.
“’Cause you know you got to be doing something with your life when you get out of here,” Mom said. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know it,” I said.
There were two other families in the room. One was a girl’s family and the other one I recognized as Play’s aunt and cousin.
“Did you look into any of the family programs they have?” Mom was still talking.
“Like what?”
“You’re just going to do your time and then slide on out to the streets again?” she asked.
“I’m going to school,” I said. “You don’t have any choice. Even if you have a high school diploma or a GED, you got to go to school unless you’re on some kind of medication where you can’t learn anything.”
“You can learn if you put your mind to it,” Mom went on. “If you don’t put your mind to it, then naturally you won’t learn anything. I don’t want you coming home and just hanging out….”
She was starting to drone on, talking about the value of education like she was inventing it or something. She came up to visit and she was sounding like a recording or a television commercial. I knew she didn’t care about what she was saying, either.
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